I agree with you on everything except the last bit. I believe the literature on what a good programmer is has been fairly clear - Fred Brooks first wrote about

I agree with you on everything except the last bit. I believe the literature on what a good programmer is has been fairly clear - Fred Brooks first wrote about it in the Mythical Man-Month, and since then there has been a large body of empirical evidence supporting his claims on the variance between good and bad programmers. Good programmers are simply more productive. They ship more code, given the same amount of time. That's a simple way of looking at things, for sure (you may argue about readability and maintainability and so on so forth), but when the difference is 20 times the average programmer, people begin to sit up and take notice.